Outsourcing Everything but the Company Name

Ooyala is a new type of distribution option that lets you organize, deliver, and monetize your content. Ooyala can also fall under the one-stop-shop category. Its pricing and tools scale well for companies just starting out and for companies that already have significant traffic. Ooyala is a good example of both a vendor that you can outsource to and a company that outsources some of its operations to better-suited partners, such as Amazon Web Services.

Content
Most content professionals would bite my head off if I said you can easily outsource the content building block of your streaming media business. Without content you are just a website with nothing to play. Without the right content, you are just a website playing video that nobody wants to watch.

That said, several companies have taken the headache out of aggregating content for you to put on your website. ROO is one such company. ROO has aggregated content from multiple sources and provides website owners with the tools to play and monetize this content. Their offering spans several genres and channels. You can offer your customers access to this quality content and get paid for the traffic you generate. ROO can also fall into the one-stop-shop category because they too provide video players, content management tools, and monetization tools along with their content offering.

The challenge with working with content aggregators to source your content is that you don’t have any exclusive content. People can find "your" content elsewhere on the web. Content aggregation services can be great tools to provide "tonage" to your library and can also be great complements to surround your own exclusive content.

For exclusive content you have three options: make it yourself, buy exclusive rights to existing content, or hire someone else to create the content for you.

Depending on your financial situation and your resource constraints, you may want to create your own content or purchase the rights to high-quality content. A good middle ground is to work with production companies that specialize in developing short-form content that matches your company’s needs. This content can be cost-effective, extremely high-quality, and viral. Companies like Disposable Television have been creating this type of content for large companies like Disney and Viacom, as well as for smaller independent groups.

According to Bryan Carmel, a co-founder of Disposable Television, "The trick is to leverage your concept by bringing in as many parties as possible that will benefit from the splash you plan to create. That might mean sponsors, it might mean a music star who is looking for widespread exposure, and it might mean distribution channels like MySpace and YouTube that just want the traffic. I think what we’ll see in the near future is more opportunity for content creators with proven track records to leverage their ability to generate hits with interesting profit-sharing models. But the key will be to maintain ownership, because you never know what you can do with a good library down the line. New markets are opening up all around the world."

Traffic
Now that you have a video website with content, you need people to watch it. Outsourcing this part of your business relies heavily on search engine optimization. You can drive a significant amount of traffic to your website with the proper SEO plan in place.

You can also drive traffic to your site with the right branding, marketing, and partnerships with other websites. This takes more work, though, and only part of that can be outsourced to branding and marketing companies.